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Saturday, August 22, 2015

Mystery Skype

I've been looking into different ways to incorporate technology into the classroom lately and came across "Mystery Skype"

Mystery Skype is basically a Skype session that your class would have with another class somewhere in the world. During the Skype session they are each trying to guess where the other school is located (by city) by asking yes and no questions.

Paul Solarz has a GREAT explanation of the whole thing (including student roles AND a seating arrangement). You can find it all here.

If I were doing this in my classroom the first thing I would do is to divide the class in half and have each class pick a different place in the world (I think I would go with country to make it a little easier to start with). They would need to do a lot of research on their country to start with and keep it a secret from the other half of the room (which would also be picking a country in the world).

Then I would give each half of the class the different roles and have them go against each other.

In Mr. Solarz classroom he makes sure they all have laptops to work on so that they can do research while the questioning is going on (to come up with the next questions and to try to figure out where the other group is).... in this case we would also need the laptops to answer the other groups questions likely.

After we did a couple of trial runs in our classroom I would set up a Skype session with one of my teaching friends in the same province as mine... just because students would likely have more knowledge of our province and some of the different towns/cities around us.

After testing it out with a class nearby us I would venture out to different parts of the world.

The benefits?
Students learn to think quick
They learn to do quick research
They learn about different parts of the world
They get to use technology!